"Mr. Brennan's lying and recent conduct characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation’s most closely held secrets and facilities, the very aim of our adversaries which is to sow division and chaos," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, reading a statement from Trump while briefing reporters on Wednesday.

"Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations -- wild outbursts on the internet and television -- about this Administration," the president‘s statement continued.

In addition, Sanders said, the administration is evaluating clearances for former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, former national security adviser Susan Rice, former FBI attorney Lisa Page, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strozk, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whose security clearance was deactivated after he was fired earlier this year, and Bruce Ohr, who is still in the Justice Department although he was demoted from associate deputy attorney general.

"More broadly, the issue of Mr. Brennan’s security clearance raises larger questions about the practice of former officials maintaining access to our nation's most sensitive secrets long after their time in government has ended," Sanders said.

The former Communist responded on Twitter:

@JohnBrennan
This action is part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics. It should gravely worry all Americans, including intelligence professionals, about the cost of speaking out. My principles are worth far more than clearances. I will not relent.

The RINO Fake Conservatives will agree with this analysis -- that stripping a very likely leaker of a security clearance he has no right to -- does in fact constitute an assault on the first amendment, while simultaneously claiming that every corporate purge of conservative voices raises not a single genuine free speech issue at all because Holy Corporations Are Their Cash-Money Benefactors.

By the way: Brennan's top secret clearance, which he is spectacularly unfit for given the very plausible suspicions he engineered the briefing and then leaked it to CNN, allows government leakers to leak to him top secret information without serious criminal consequences. They could be fired, they could be disciplined, but they couldn't be prosecuted under the Espionage Act because the person they're leaking to has a top secret clearance -- even if he has no actual right or reason to have the information.

Why leave leakers the Brennan Option? What is being gained here?

Oh right: What CNN and the NeverTrump lunatics want is to make it legal to leak top secret information if that information can be used against Trump. They want to preserve this leak loophole because of a crass political agenda.

#BecauseMuhPrinciples.

By the way: MasterCard and Patreon have suspended Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch -- not Richard Spencer of Naziism and Aryan Pride Manboobs -- for no stated reason. The actual reason is a pressure campaign based on the notorious crosshairs-applying hate group the SPLC's designation of him as some kind of "extremist." And the goal is to choke him off from crowdfunding and thus to silence him.

I've been axed from Patreon, without explanation, warning or notice -- no doubt as part of the ongoing efforts of the Left to deny all platforms to those who reject its agenda. To those who supported me there, thank you, and I'm sorry we couldn't follow through on plans. pic.twitter.com/rJ8kaUNqYI

NeverTrump and the CNN First Amendement defenders will swear to #MuhSacredEternalPrinciples that John "Leaky" Brennan has a permanent property right in his security clearance, but will not say a ***damn peep about Robert Spencer, because -- say it with me -- Corporations are Holy and must never have their own first amendment rights even questioned (or challenged via counter-boycott) whereas citizens' free speech rights are silly, trivial thing which are not entitled to any sort of counter-pressure from the nominal right's bought-and-paid-for corporate client class.

Just as Businesses Can Do Anything if they're purging an enemy of the left and the NeverTrump rump, but if a business fires an anti-Trump liberal like James Gunn, or a Member of the Clique like Kevin D. Williamson, suddenly the Private Businesses May Do Anything rule goes out the window for days and dreary days of strident arguing about how such private business decisions threaten the very foundations of the Republic.

Liberals and their buddies -- they'll elevate them above the Sacred Near-Inviolable Rights of Private Businesses.

But for peons like you -- then the rule of Absolute Corporate Power is invoked.

They're allowed to do that. But gun-rights advocates are also entitled to exert counter-pressure and threats of boycott to show their own (free speech) disapproval.

Which is what the left did in the first place to pressure Shopify into doing this.

But if you suggest that the right engate such a campaign, David French and Jonah Goldberg will lecture you about not impinging on the Holy Corporation's free speech rights, completely forgetting that you the citizen-consumer also have a similar arsenal of rights, and that the store owners now deplatformed also have their own rights.

When it's you being pressured into silence, they say: Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, such as corporate economic blockades.

But when someone suggests a counter-boycott against the corporation, the rule is no longer "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences."

In fact, the rule quickly shifts to "A corporation's free speech must be free of all consequences, including even counter-pressure to balance/cancel the left's original pressure."

Corporations are Holy and their rights are so primary that they not only trump every one else's but in fact are so precious that it's a First Amendment violation to even suggest applying counter-pressure.

This is all terrific. It's great to subsidize and donate to a group of supposed advocates who always advocate against your interests and in favor of those attacking your own rights, such as leftist pressure groups and the corporations they bend to their will.